On Wed, 7 Nov 2007, Mirto Silvio Busico wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> my laptop sometimes shut down abruptely.
> It seems that it is a thermal problem.
>
> I can hear the fan spinning when there is a lot of cpu activity; but
> when there is a disk activity the fan remain silent.
[...]
> There is any method to control the fan or at least to force the fan to
> maximum speed?
My fan works fine by itself now (Thinkpad X31), but I recall needing to use
the command
echo 3 > /proc/acpi/[SOMEPATH]/fan
on Etch as root to turn my fan off when it became stuck on full after
suspending. I could also use values from 0-3 to set it to different speeds.
I now use Lenny and the fan file has a slightly different path and more
detailed content, e.g.:
status: enabled
speed: 0
level: auto
However, now I find I can't write to this file directly, even as root, who
supposedly has write permissions! This I don't get.
Anyhow, if you can find your /proc/acpi/.../fan file, see what's in it and
change the value of the fan speed (if you can write to it), that may work.
HTH,
John